![]() ![]() ![]() The pose, with Churchill grasping the arms of his chair, recalls the statue of US President Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. He took his preliminary materials back to his studio to create the final work on a large square canvas, the shape chosen to figuratively represent Churchill's solidity, reflecting a remark that Churchill made, "I am a rock". Sutherland also worked from photographs by Elsbeth Juda. Sutherland made charcoal sketches of Churchill at a handful of sittings at Chartwell from August 1954, concentrating on Churchill's hands and face, and then made some oil studies. Churchill hoped to be depicted in his robes as a Knight of the Garter, but the commission specified that he should be shown in his usual parliamentary dress – a black morning coat, with waistcoat and striped trousers, and a spotted bow tie. Sutherland and Churchill had very different conceptions of the painting. He was drawn to capturing the real person: some sitters considered his disinclination to flattery as a form of cruelty or disparagement. Sutherland had a reputation as a modernist painter with some recent successful portraits, such as Somerset Maugham in 1949. After the death of Lady Churchill in 1977, it became clear that she had the painting destroyed some months after it was delivered.Ĭhurchill was an elder statesman in 1954, then towards the end of his second period as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. After the public presentation, the painting was taken to his country home at Chartwell but was not put on display. The painting was presented to Churchill by both Houses of Parliament at a public ceremony in Westminster Hall on his 80th birthday on 30 November 1954.Ĭhurchill hated the portrait. The 1,000 guinea fee for the painting was funded by donations from members of the House of Commons and House of Lords. It was all a million miles from the white cliff of a lower lip Yousuf Karsh had caught beautifully in the dark days of the war.In 1954 the English artist Graham Sutherland was commissioned to paint a full-length portrait of Sir Winston Churchill. Here was slackness, loss, a kind of absence. He painted an obituary: a magnificent ruin, but a ruin all the same. Sutherland’s subject had asked him whether he wanted the cherub or the bulldog, as if there were only two possible interpretations of his character, and perhaps in revenge for this insult Sutherland now decided to deliver not some visual blandishment, but the truth. On the other was Sutherland, a superb painter who was quietly steaming. On one side was Churchill, the crumbling egotist, then recovering from a stroke. You could, he said, call these pictures “war photography”. In Churchill’s studio at Chartwell, his home in Kent, Schama held up a series of black-and-white stills of the prime minister, taken during his sittings with Graham Sutherland. (Episode one was devoted to the relationship between portraiture and power.) His skill was demonstrated to perfection in the first ten minutes, during which he told the story of the portrait that was commissioned to celebrate the 80th birthday of Winston Churchill in 1954 – the same painting that was famously burned by Clementine Churchill just a few weeks after its very public unveiling. I won’t ramble on here about how he dealt, in the first film (broadcast on BBC2 on 30 September), with such hoary subjects as the painted image of Elizabeth I, or the effect of photography on the relationship between Queen Victoria and her people. I would be tempted to use the word “masterful” if it didn’t sound so stupidly grandiloquent. His passion for his subject is sincere, his curiosity contagious rather than effortfully cloying. So, too, is his way with words, so succinct and yet slyly romantic. Schama’s ability to structure, pace and deliver a televisual essay is unmatched by any other BBC historian. Nothing now stands in the way of my enjoyment of Face of Britain (Wednesdays, 9pm). All the same, it seems to me a good thing. Why this should be is anyone’s guess: perhaps he tired of the stick he used to take about it. Simon Schama’s arms used to windmill wildly on screen, but in his fantastic new series his hands are most often to be found in his pockets. ![]()
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